Minotaur may allude to a Greek myth, be loosely based on a film by Claude Chabrol (The Unfaithful Wife), and represent the first work director Andrey Zvyagintsev (The Return, Leviathan) has made entirely outside Russia. (Shot in Latvia, it is officially a French-German-Latvia co-production.) But it’s about as Russian as a film could be. It’s as Russian as horseradish vodka, forest steppe marmots, and the word toska, a Russian term that connotes a profound melancholy whose many shades Vladimir Nabokov said could not be captured in English, but which range from “great spiritual anguish” to “physical or metaphysical dissatisfaction, a sense of longing, a dull anguish, a preying misery, a gnawing mental ache.”
This rigorously well-made, grippy-as-a-live-squid, toska-steeped work is Zvyagintsev’s most openly critical commentary on the motherland’s current political, spiritual and moral malaise, a denunciation never said in so many words but expressed with intricate layers of irony.
Minotaur
The Bottom Line
An immaculate exercise in irony and indirection.
